Brown-Eyed Girl (Travises 4)

Eli had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, but he had never regained consciousness.

“My mother’s not coming,” I had told Sofia as we sat together in the hospital room.

“Mine either.”

We had glanced at each other in mutual understanding. Neither of us had to ask why no one else had come to say good-bye. When a man abandoned his family, the hurt of it kept bringing out the worst in them long after he’d gone.

“Why are you here?” I dared to ask.

While Sofia considered her answer, the silence was punctured by the beeps from a monitor and the ventilator’s constant rhythmic whoosh. “My family is Mexican,” she finally said. “To them, everything is about togetherness and tradition. I always wanted to belong, but I knew I was different. My cousins all had fathers, while mine was a mystery. Mamá would never talk about him.” Her gaze went to the bed where our father lay enmeshed inside a tangle of tubes and wires that hydrated, fed, breathed, regulated, and drained. “I only saw him once, when I was a little girl and he came to visit. Mamá wouldn’t let him talk to me, but I ran after him when he walked out to his car. He was holding some balloons he’d brought for me.” She smiled absently. “I thought he was the handsomest man in the world. He tied the ribbons around my wrist so the balloons wouldn’t float away. After he drove off, I tried to bring the balloons into the house, but Mamá said I had to get rid of them. So I untied the ribbons and let them go, and I made a wish as I watched them float away.”

“You wished that you would see him again someday,” I said quietly.

Sofia nodded. “That’s why I came. What about you?”

“Because I thought no one else would be here. And if someone had to take care of Eli, I didn’t want it to be a total stranger.”

Sofia’s hand had covered mine, as naturally as if we’d known each other all our lives. “Now it’s the two of us,” she’d said simply.

Eli had passed away the next day. But in the process of losing him, Sofia and I had found each other.

At the time I had been working in bridal couture, but my career had been going nowhere. Sofia had been working as a nanny in San Antonio, planning children’s parties on the side. We had talked about starting a wedding-planning studio together. Now, a little more than three years later, our Houston-based business was working out better than we had even dared to hope. Each small success had built on the next, allowing us to hire three employees and an intern. With the Kendrick wedding, we were on the verge of a breakthrough.

As long as we didn’t screw up.

“Why didn’t you say yes?” Sofia demanded after I told her about meeting Joe Travis.

“Because I don’t believe for one minute that he was actually interested in me.” I paused. “Oh, don’t give me that look. You know that type of guy goes for trophy women.”

I had been voluptuous since adolescence. I walked everywhere, took the stairs whenever possible, and went to a dance class twice a week. I ate healthy food and routinely consumed enough salad to choke a manatee. But no amount of exercise and or dieting would ever shrink me down to a single-digit dress size. Sofia often urged me to buy more body-conscious clothes, and I always told her I would do it later, when I was the right size.

“You’re the right size now,” Sofia would reply.

I knew that I shouldn’t let a bathroom scale stand between me and happiness. Some days I won, but more often than not, the scale won.

“My grandmother always says, ‘Sólo las ollas saben los hervores de su caldo.’”

“Something about soup?” I guessed. Whenever Sofia related some of her grandmother’s wisdom, it usually took the form of food analogies.

“Only pots know the boilings of their broths,” Sofia said. “Maybe Joe Travis is the kind who loves a woman with a real figure. The men I knew in San Antonio always went for the women with big pompis.” She patted her rear end for emphasis and went to her laptop.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Googling him.”

“Right now?”

“It will only take a minute.”

“You don’t have a minute – you’re supposed to be working!”

Ignoring me, Sofia kept pecking at the keyboard, two-finger style.

“I don’t care what you find out about him,” I said. “Because I happen to be busy with this thing we’ve got scheduled… What was it?… Oh, yes, a wedding.”

“He’s hot,” Sofia said, staring at her monitor. “And so is his brother.”

She had clicked on a Houston Chronicle article headed with a photo of three men, all dressed in beautifully tailored suits. One of them was Joe, much younger and lankier than he’d been today. He must have packed on at least thirty pounds of muscle since the photo had been taken. A caption beneath the picture identified the other two as Joe’s brother Jack and his father, Churchill. Both sons were a head taller than their sire, but they bore his stamp – the dark hair and intense eyes, the pronounced jawlines.

I frowned as I read the accompanying article.

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) In the aftermath of an explosion on their private boat, two sons of Houston businessman Churchill Travis tread water among fiery debris for approximately four hours as they waited for rescue. After a massive search effort by the Coast Guard, the brothers, Jack and Joseph, were located in Gulf waters off Galveston. Joseph Travis was airlifted directly to the level one trauma unit at Garner Hospital for immediate surgery. According to a hospital spokesman, his condition has been listed as critical but stable. Although details of the surgery have not been released, a source close to the family confirmed that Travis was suffering from internal bleeding as well as —